In response to Glick’s article, with a link also to my posts, blogger and professor Robert Farley at Lawyer, Guns and Money blog not only accused Glick of not being concerned with Israel’s survival, but also dismissed concerns about Turkey: “It’s difficult to plow through the many layers of rank idiocy in the assertion that Turkey is ‘lost to the Islamists.'”

Not that The Washington Post is the last word on the subject, but I take note of this interesting editorial (not an op-ed) today:

Yet, as his tenure lengthens, it is becoming evident that Mr. [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s commitment to democratic principles and Western values is far from complete. As Turkey’s prospects of joining the European Union have dimmed, the government’s foreign policy has taken a nasty turn: Shrill denunciations of Israel have been accompanied by increasing coziness with the criminal rulers of Iran, Syria and Sudan. Mr. Erdogan recently declared that Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has been indicted for war crimes in Darfur, was welcome in Turkey because “a Muslim can never commit genocide.”

Even more concerning is Mr. Erdogan’s treatment of the Turkish media. Frustrated by hostility toward his government by media conglomerates that formed part of Turkey’s traditional secular establishment, the prime minister and his allies have resorted to increasingly heavy-handed measures….

Mr. Erdogan and his party were once seen by many in Washington as a model for how pious Muslims could practice democratic politics. That image is rapidly darkening. If it is not to be extinguished, Mr. Erdogan must stop coddling Muslim dictators — and stop following their practice of silencing domestic opposition.

If the apologists at Lawyers, Guns and Money want to play word games over whether Turkey is “lost,” that is their prerogative.

But the rest of us don’t need to play word games; if Turkey is not lost, Turkey is being lost to the Islamists and becoming the next Iran in part because of an attitude of denial and political correctness in the West.